Studying regression in Rett syndrome may help us understand the phenomenon in autism, as it occurs at the same time in both disorders and includes many of the same features, says Jeffrey Neul.
 

A distinct pattern of brain waves related to language comprehension predicts how well 2-year-old children with autism will fare later in childhood, according to unpublished research presented last week at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting in San Francisco.

Infants at high risk of developing autism do not show the typical tendency to shift their language processing ability to one side of the brain around 9 months of age, according to a study published in December in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Children who carry an extra copy of the 15q11-13 region of the genome usually have autism and sleep troubles, as well as distinctive brain-wave patterns and facial features, according to a report published 14 March in Autism Research.

‘Underconnectivity’ is considered one of the best-supported theories for the neural basis of autism. But many questions remain unanswered, says Jon Brock.

To better understand how local connectivity is altered in autism, we first need to define what it means, says Tal Kenet.

In 2003, John Rubenstein and Michael Merzenich first described the theory, now popular in autism, that the disorder reflects an imbalance between excitation and inhibition in the brain. Takao K. Hensch and Parizad M. Bilimoria review the paper and its impact on the field.

Mice lacking CDKL5, a gene linked to both Rett syndrome and autism, show features associated with both disorders, according to a study published 26 December in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Husband and wife research team Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl have shown that learning is a fundamentally social process, beginning in early infancy.

Children with the autism-related disorder tuberous sclerosis complex show sluggish brain activity in response to images of faces, according to a study published 8 November in the Journal of Child Neurology.